KAWS: FAMILY
Adapting an existing brand to fit a new local audience
Art Direction
Known by the moniker KAWS, the popular artist Brian Donnelly presented his first major museum exhibition on the West Coast, bringing over 100 works spanning three decades of painting, drawing, sculpture, and design collaborations to SFMOMA. KAWS: FAMILY was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) before landing in SF.
The campaign arrived at SFMOMA already carrying a typographic identity from earlier stops on its international tour. My challenge was adapting that existing brand to a new context: San Francisco's dense, visually noisy urban landscape, where a traveling identity built for other cities needed to cut through and feel native to a new skyline, at a moment when the museum was actively working to rebuild attendance after a steep post-pandemic decline.
The solution was a brighter, bolder color palette built for outdoor legibility, unified across a multi-channel Out of Home and digital campaign. For digital placements, this meant incorporating playful motion graphics designed to catch the eye mid-scroll rather than sit static. On-site, the exhibition's title treatment had to be adapted to the specific conditions of SFMOMA's architecture — working around real sightlines and structural constraints rather than a generic gallery wall.
The exhibition opened alongside HOLIDAY: San Francisco, a 36-foot inflatable KAWS sculpture on SFMOMA's rooftop and the fourteenth stop in the artist's ongoing public art project — a highly visible complement to the campaign that made the show part of the city's skyline before visitors ever stepped inside. The exhibition drew strong turnout from opening day, with lines forming around the block. Ticket and store sales for KAWS merchandise broke museum records during the time of the exhibition and proved a crowd favorite.
The campaign arrived at SFMOMA already carrying a typographic identity from earlier stops on its international tour. My challenge was adapting that existing brand to a new context: San Francisco's dense, visually noisy urban landscape, where a traveling identity built for other cities needed to cut through and feel native to a new skyline, at a moment when the museum was actively working to rebuild attendance after a steep post-pandemic decline.
The solution was a brighter, bolder color palette built for outdoor legibility, unified across a multi-channel Out of Home and digital campaign. For digital placements, this meant incorporating playful motion graphics designed to catch the eye mid-scroll rather than sit static. On-site, the exhibition's title treatment had to be adapted to the specific conditions of SFMOMA's architecture — working around real sightlines and structural constraints rather than a generic gallery wall.
The exhibition opened alongside HOLIDAY: San Francisco, a 36-foot inflatable KAWS sculpture on SFMOMA's rooftop and the fourteenth stop in the artist's ongoing public art project — a highly visible complement to the campaign that made the show part of the city's skyline before visitors ever stepped inside. The exhibition drew strong turnout from opening day, with lines forming around the block. Ticket and store sales for KAWS merchandise broke museum records during the time of the exhibition and proved a crowd favorite.
Exhibition Design: Edward Whelan